Women, the Institute, and Collections Webinar April 13

The Royal United Services Institute was founded in 1831 as the ‘Naval and Military Museum and Library’. The founding patrons were the Duke of Wellington and King George IV and its members were drawn from the officer classes of the services. However, it received its royal warrant from Queen Victoria and the museum received a significant Florence Nightingale collection on deposit – now dispersed to other institutions. The history of women at RUSI, though, really begins in 1941 when the RUSI Council voted to admit women, with the caveat that they were in uniform. In 1942 the first seven women members were recorded in the RUSI Journal, speaker Jacqui Grainger will discuss who these women were and the roles they played in the history of women in the armed services. She will also ponder what the presence of women was in the collections and has begun the process of establishing a women’s studies collection and re-classifying books by and about women as she discovers them on the shelves of the library. She will give some initial responses to the material she is finding and what it says about women in military history. Learn more and register for this webinar today!